Insight

Ilhan Omar Isn't Above the Law Either

By David Harsanyi

Published Oct. 19, 2026

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One of the foundational ideals of a free nation is that all its citizens live under the same rules. Democrats know this. They've been lecturing us for years that "no one is above the law."

So, what happens if a federal investigation into Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) provides incontrovertible evidence that she obtained citizenship by lying? Should we ignore it? Should Omar be given an exemption from the law because she's in Congress? Or because she's a Democrat?

Those on the left carping about the investigation into Omar being politically motivated can't be taken seriously. Not after they spent a decade engaged in blatant lawfare -- first by attempting to annul the 2016 election of Donald Trump by concocting one lurid conspiracy theory after the next, and then by trying to stop him from running for the presidency in 2024.

When you spend your time stripping away norms, you can't expect the other side to unilaterally disarm.

The New York Times reported that the court and the Justice Department debated the warrant to search Omar's residences for weeks before it was finally issued. Courts are in a separate branch of government for an important reason, and they should be highly suspicious of any case that appears to involve abuse of the legal system for political reasons.

But the fact that a Biden-appointed U.S. magistrate judge in Washington, D.C., believed there was probable cause for a raid tells us that there is at least something worth investigating. Or, as Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) once said, before "a grand jury indicts anyone, they need evidence. Searches are a way to get evidence. Get it?" We do.

There are two issues at hand. The more serious one is whether Omar's father obtained his citizenship by lying about both himself and his daughter.

Nur Omar Mohamed brought his Somali family members from a refugee camp in Kenya in 1995. The late patriarch's story about fleeing persecution looks dubious. Indeed, he may well have been a soldier loyal to Somali dictator Siad Barre and a participant in the persecution.

More pertinently, he or his daughter may have lied about Ilhan's age on immigration documents when he was naturalized in 2000. "I became a citizen actually before I turned 18," Omar said in a 2018 interview. "My father became a citizen and so I got my citizenship through that process."

As a 17-year-old minor, Omar was automatically given citizenship. If, in reality, she was 18 or 19, she would have been compelled to go through the naturalization process herself.

Under the law, even a child who derived citizenship through a parent could lose that status if the parent concealed or willfully misrepresented facts to obtain naturalization. And the fact that Omar's staff appears to have changed the congresswoman's date of birth after her election in 2019 could also suggest that she knew about the discrepancy.

The Wall Street Journal reports that all of this is aimed at building a case to strip Omar of her U.S. citizenship and ultimately deport her. Until the Trump administration, the crime of willfully lying during the process of obtaining citizenship had rarely been prosecuted at all, which is a shame.

Stripping an American of citizenship should be treated as an extraordinarily serious matter. The problem is that we haven't been very serious when handing out citizenship.

If Omar gained her citizenship by lying, she, at the very minimum, should not be serving in Congress.

The other ongoing investigation concerns whether Omar inflated her net worth on congressional forms. In her disclosures filed in 2025, Omar reported that she and her husband, Tim Mynett, were worth between $6 million and $30 million, an impressive jump from 15,000-51,000 the year before. Omar later amended her disclosure to claim that her household's net worth was between $18,004 and $95,000.

It is unclear why Omar would lie or whether there is any underlying criminal act being investigated, but how plausible is it that a 40-something, college-educated congresswoman doesn't know whether she is worth $30 million or $95,000?

You might recall that New York Attorney General Letitia James filed a civil fraud lawsuit against Trump, claiming that his companies had fraudulently inflated their net worth. At the time, congressmen like Mondaire Jones pointed out that "no one is above that law, not even the former president of the United States and his crime family."

Would Omar have been targeted if she weren't in Congress? Probably not. Does that make her innocent? Hardly.

(COMMENT, BELOW)

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